When icons fall
Just recently I got a tweet on my feed that had the following article:
and I read it, bit by bit, till the end of it. It was hard to read because it was talking and showing a trait of someone that was an icon during my University years, Richard Stallman. The sad part is that the more I read the article the more I could see that the person writing it was being honest about it or at least I hope so.
To be honest I wished that this article were fake news, that RMS is not the guy portrayed in the article. In my freshmen years in Brazil, back 20+ years ago when having fast internet was nothing but a dream and overclocking CPU’s were just the norm, RMS went to give a talk to a bunch of Computer Science freshmen and it was by far one of my favorite memories from that time.
I had never heard about Linux before and all of the sudden I had this guy giving out CD’s (yeah, CD’s) with a distro of Linux, talking highly about the computer science world and, being in Brazil, having exposure to a guy like him was, to be honest, a one of the kind experience.
And then I read that article and everything that was said and I still have this little hope that is just a miss-understanding, even knowing that it doesn’t seem this way.
He wouldn’t be the first that I learn something that completely shocks me and probably won’t be the last.
Regardless if this was RMS or anyone else, one thing that the article mentions is true, we gotta be better in tech, but not only in tech, in everything.
For today I will remain sad to learn something new but yet sad about someone that showed a new world to a freshman about 20 years or so.
